#neilpostman — Public Fediverse posts

“The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation”*…

Matt Pearce revisits Neil Postman‘s 1992 Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology…

In the 1960s, a German-American computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum coded an early version of today’s AI chatbots. Weizenbaum called his program ELIZA, after the “My Fair Lady” character Eliza Doolittle who takes speech lessons (and gets better).

How people reacted to Weizenbaum’s crude creation tells us almost everything we need to know about AI hype more than half a century later.

ELIZA could hold basic “conversations,” including playing the role of a psychotherapist with real human users. [In the example above, ELIZA’s responses to one woman are shown in capital letters.]

Anybody with a cursory awareness of recent headlines about AI romances and AI psychosis already knows where this is going. ELIZA’s human interlocuters in the 1960s, despite talking to a clunky machine they knew had been programmed by Weizenbaum, refused to believe that they were talking to a mere machine. His secretary, having watched him build the contraption over several months, after just a few exchanges with ELIZA, asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so she could have some privacy.

Weizenbaum, exhibiting a bit of Freudian sangfroid about all this, was not surprised to see people form emotional attachments with inanimate objects. He’d already seen people get attached to their cars or guitars or computers. But “what I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people,” Weizenbaum wrote in his 1976 book “Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation.”…

… I learned about Weizenbaum’s ELIZA experiment from Neil Postman’s 1992 book “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology,” a work of technoconservatism that, like Weizenbaum’s writings, was imbued with foresight about our struggles with today’s vastly more powerful technologies.

Consider this passage from Postman’s “Technopoly”:

In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.

Technology, attacking and taking over the culture? Bending society to its own imperative for advancement? In my United States of America? Postman (most famous for writing “Amusing Ourselves to Death”) thought the U.S. was the world’s first “Technopoly,” a society marked by “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology,” where information itself has become a form of pollution.

To Postman, “the milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning or purpose.”

Neil Postman wrote “Technopoly” before the introduction of ChatGPT and Sora; TikTok and YouTube; Twitter and Facebook; Google Search and the Netscape browser. Postman wrote the book before Windows 95 existed. A philosophy of technology that mostly holds up through successive eras of technical revolution has already passed time’s first test, which is for the philosophy to outlive the philosopher. And Postman’s philosophy is ultimately conservative, motivated by the desire to preserve the traditions of humanism, social cohesion and a shareable sense of collective history.

Technoconservatism was old before it was new. Postman quotes Plato’s “Phaedrus,” where Thamus warns that whoever learns writing (one of our first dangerous technologies) “will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful” and “will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” And Postman, to his credit, is like — well, yeah! Writing really did that. A new technology is neither good nor bad, but ecological: it “does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe.”

In previous generations, societies dealt with information revolutions (which always produced information gluts) by creating institutions that prioritize “good” information and deprioritize the bad; think about schools with their organized curricula, courts with their standards of evidence, newspapers with their party lines or codes of journalistic ethics. But Postman notes that we got lucky after the Gutenberg revolution, when information technology’s development slowed down long enough for societies to catch up and be excellent:

From the early seventeenth century, when Western culture undertook to reorganize itself to accommodate the printing press, until the mid-nineteenth century [with the invention of the telegraph], no significant technologies were introduced that altered the form, volume, or speed of information. As a consequence, Western culture had more than two hundred years to accustom itself to the new information conditions created by the press. It developed new institutions, such as the school and representative government. It developed new conceptions of knowledge and intelligence, and a heightened respect for reason and privacy. It developed new forms of economic activity, such as mechanized production and corporate capitalism, and even gave articulate expression to the possibilities of a humane socialism. New forms of public discourse came into being through newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and books. It is no wonder that the eighteenth century gave us in the work of Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Vico, Edward Gibbon, and, of course, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Thomas Paine. I weight the list with America’s “Founding Fathers” because technocratic-typographic America was the first nation ever to be argued into existence in print.

Contrast the luxuriously slow social pace of the Gutenberg era with today’s information development timelines. Over the course of three decades, we’ve seen the rise and now-decline of the open web; the rise and now-decline of social media; the rise of short-form video and the rise of chatbots and synthetic information. All created enormous economic and philosophical disruptions whose fundamental impacts you can’t get a group of people in a room together to describe accurately. Among the disruptions: These increasingly efficient forms of sharing information keep encountering falling test scores; universities are trying to implement AI as their own students use it for cheating or boo the tech at their graduations; people are falling in love with their chatbots, which sometimes tell their users to kill themselves. A society that wants to understand itself probably wouldn’t act like this…

Read on for how we might — dare one suggest, should— act: “A society that wants to understand itself probably wouldn’t act like this,” from @mattdpearce.com.

Compare to/contrast with with Yuval Avnar‘s riff on Pascal’s musing on the implications of his invention, the “arithmetic machine” (an early, if not the first, modern mechanical calculator): “The Inventor of the Thinking Machine Didn’t Worry. Neither Should You.“

* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

###

As we introspect, we might send pointed birthday greetings to Ambrose Bierce; he was born on this date in 1842. His satirical lexicon The Devil’s Dictionary was named as one of “The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature” by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration.  His story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” has been described as “one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature”; and his book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (also published as In the Midst of Life) was named by the Grolier Club as one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900.

A prolific and versatile writer, Bierce was regarded as one of the most influential journalists in the United States, and as a pioneering writer of realist fiction.  For his horror writing, Michael Dirda ranked him alongside Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft.  S. T. Joshi argues that he may well be the greatest satirist America has ever produced, and can take his place with such figures as Juvenal, Swift, and Voltaire.  His war stories influenced Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and others; and he was an influential and feared literary critic.  In recent decades Bierce has gained even wider regard as a fabulist and for his poetry.

In 1913, Bierce told reporters that he was travelling to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. He disappeared over the border and was never seen again. 

Apropos the piece featured above:

TELEPHONE, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

– The Devil’s Dictionary

source

“The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation”*…

Matt Pearce revisits Neil Postman‘s 1992 Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology…

In the 1960s, a German-American computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum coded an early version of today’s AI chatbots. Weizenbaum called his program ELIZA, after the “My Fair Lady” character Eliza Doolittle who takes speech lessons (and gets better).

How people reacted to Weizenbaum’s crude creation tells us almost everything we need to know about AI hype more than half a century later.

ELIZA could hold basic “conversations,” including playing the role of a psychotherapist with real human users. [In the example above, ELIZA’s responses to one woman are shown in capital letters.]

Anybody with a cursory awareness of recent headlines about AI romances and AI psychosis already knows where this is going. ELIZA’s human interlocuters in the 1960s, despite talking to a clunky machine they knew had been programmed by Weizenbaum, refused to believe that they were talking to a mere machine. His secretary, having watched him build the contraption over several months, after just a few exchanges with ELIZA, asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so she could have some privacy.

Weizenbaum, exhibiting a bit of Freudian sangfroid about all this, was not surprised to see people form emotional attachments with inanimate objects. He’d already seen people get attached to their cars or guitars or computers. But “what I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people,” Weizenbaum wrote in his 1976 book “Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation.”…

… I learned about Weizenbaum’s ELIZA experiment from Neil Postman’s 1992 book “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology,” a work of technoconservatism that, like Weizenbaum’s writings, was imbued with foresight about our struggles with today’s vastly more powerful technologies.

Consider this passage from Postman’s “Technopoly”:

In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.

Technology, attacking and taking over the culture? Bending society to its own imperative for advancement? In my United States of America? Postman (most famous for writing “Amusing Ourselves to Death”) thought the U.S. was the world’s first “Technopoly,” a society marked by “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology,” where information itself has become a form of pollution.

To Postman, “the milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning or purpose.”

Neil Postman wrote “Technopoly” before the introduction of ChatGPT and Sora; TikTok and YouTube; Twitter and Facebook; Google Search and the Netscape browser. Postman wrote the book before Windows 95 existed. A philosophy of technology that mostly holds up through successive eras of technical revolution has already passed time’s first test, which is for the philosophy to outlive the philosopher. And Postman’s philosophy is ultimately conservative, motivated by the desire to preserve the traditions of humanism, social cohesion and a shareable sense of collective history.

Technoconservatism was old before it was new. Postman quotes Plato’s “Phaedrus,” where Thamus warns that whoever learns writing (one of our first dangerous technologies) “will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful” and “will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” And Postman, to his credit, is like — well, yeah! Writing really did that. A new technology is neither good nor bad, but ecological: it “does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe.”

In previous generations, societies dealt with information revolutions (which always produced information gluts) by creating institutions that prioritize “good” information and deprioritize the bad; think about schools with their organized curricula, courts with their standards of evidence, newspapers with their party lines or codes of journalistic ethics. But Postman notes that we got lucky after the Gutenberg revolution, when information technology’s development slowed down long enough for societies to catch up and be excellent:

From the early seventeenth century, when Western culture undertook to reorganize itself to accommodate the printing press, until the mid-nineteenth century [with the invention of the telegraph], no significant technologies were introduced that altered the form, volume, or speed of information. As a consequence, Western culture had more than two hundred years to accustom itself to the new information conditions created by the press. It developed new institutions, such as the school and representative government. It developed new conceptions of knowledge and intelligence, and a heightened respect for reason and privacy. It developed new forms of economic activity, such as mechanized production and corporate capitalism, and even gave articulate expression to the possibilities of a humane socialism. New forms of public discourse came into being through newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and books. It is no wonder that the eighteenth century gave us in the work of Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Vico, Edward Gibbon, and, of course, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Thomas Paine. I weight the list with America’s “Founding Fathers” because technocratic-typographic America was the first nation ever to be argued into existence in print.

Contrast the luxuriously slow social pace of the Gutenberg era with today’s information development timelines. Over the course of three decades, we’ve seen the rise and now-decline of the open web; the rise and now-decline of social media; the rise of short-form video and the rise of chatbots and synthetic information. All created enormous economic and philosophical disruptions whose fundamental impacts you can’t get a group of people in a room together to describe accurately. Among the disruptions: These increasingly efficient forms of sharing information keep encountering falling test scores; universities are trying to implement AI as their own students use it for cheating or boo the tech at their graduations; people are falling in love with their chatbots, which sometimes tell their users to kill themselves. A society that wants to understand itself probably wouldn’t act like this…

Read on for how we might — dare one suggest, should— act: “A society that wants to understand itself probably wouldn’t act like this,” from @mattdpearce.com.

Compare to/contrast with with Yuval Avnar‘s riff on Pascal’s musing on the implications of his invention, the “arithmetic machine” (an early, if not the first, modern mechanical calculator): “The Inventor of the Thinking Machine Didn’t Worry. Neither Should You.“

* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

###

As we introspect, we might send pointed birthday greetings to Ambrose Bierce; he was born on this date in 1842. His satirical lexicon The Devil’s Dictionary was named as one of “The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature” by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration.  His story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” has been described as “one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature”; and his book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (also published as In the Midst of Life) was named by the Grolier Club as one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900.

A prolific and versatile writer, Bierce was regarded as one of the most influential journalists in the United States, and as a pioneering writer of realist fiction.  For his horror writing, Michael Dirda ranked him alongside Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft.  S. T. Joshi argues that he may well be the greatest satirist America has ever produced, and can take his place with such figures as Juvenal, Swift, and Voltaire.  His war stories influenced Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and others; and he was an influential and feared literary critic.  In recent decades Bierce has gained even wider regard as a fabulist and for his poetry.

In 1913, Bierce told reporters that he was travelling to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. He disappeared over the border and was never seen again. 

Apropos the piece featured above:

TELEPHONE, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

– The Devil’s Dictionary

source

“The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation”*…

Matt Pearce revisits Neil Postman‘s 1992 Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology…

In the 1960s, a German-American computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum coded an early version of today’s AI chatbots. Weizenbaum called his program ELIZA, after the “My Fair Lady” character Eliza Doolittle who takes speech lessons (and gets better).

How people reacted to Weizenbaum’s crude creation tells us almost everything we need to know about AI hype more than half a century later.

ELIZA could hold basic “conversations,” including playing the role of a psychotherapist with real human users. [In the example above, ELIZA’s responses to one woman are shown in capital letters.]

Anybody with a cursory awareness of recent headlines about AI romances and AI psychosis already knows where this is going. ELIZA’s human interlocuters in the 1960s, despite talking to a clunky machine they knew had been programmed by Weizenbaum, refused to believe that they were talking to a mere machine. His secretary, having watched him build the contraption over several months, after just a few exchanges with ELIZA, asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so she could have some privacy.

Weizenbaum, exhibiting a bit of Freudian sangfroid about all this, was not surprised to see people form emotional attachments with inanimate objects. He’d already seen people get attached to their cars or guitars or computers. But “what I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people,” Weizenbaum wrote in his 1976 book “Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation.”…

… I learned about Weizenbaum’s ELIZA experiment from Neil Postman’s 1992 book “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology,” a work of technoconservatism that, like Weizenbaum’s writings, was imbued with foresight about our struggles with today’s vastly more powerful technologies.

Consider this passage from Postman’s “Technopoly”:

In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.

Technology, attacking and taking over the culture? Bending society to its own imperative for advancement? In my United States of America? Postman (most famous for writing “Amusing Ourselves to Death”) thought the U.S. was the world’s first “Technopoly,” a society marked by “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology,” where information itself has become a form of pollution.

To Postman, “the milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning or purpose.”

Neil Postman wrote “Technopoly” before the introduction of ChatGPT and Sora; TikTok and YouTube; Twitter and Facebook; Google Search and the Netscape browser. Postman wrote the book before Windows 95 existed. A philosophy of technology that mostly holds up through successive eras of technical revolution has already passed time’s first test, which is for the philosophy to outlive the philosopher. And Postman’s philosophy is ultimately conservative, motivated by the desire to preserve the traditions of humanism, social cohesion and a shareable sense of collective history.

Technoconservatism was old before it was new. Postman quotes Plato’s “Phaedrus,” where Thamus warns that whoever learns writing (one of our first dangerous technologies) “will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful” and “will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” And Postman, to his credit, is like — well, yeah! Writing really did that. A new technology is neither good nor bad, but ecological: it “does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe.”

In previous generations, societies dealt with information revolutions (which always produced information gluts) by creating institutions that prioritize “good” information and deprioritize the bad; think about schools with their organized curricula, courts with their standards of evidence, newspapers with their party lines or codes of journalistic ethics. But Postman notes that we got lucky after the Gutenberg revolution, when information technology’s development slowed down long enough for societies to catch up and be excellent:

From the early seventeenth century, when Western culture undertook to reorganize itself to accommodate the printing press, until the mid-nineteenth century [with the invention of the telegraph], no significant technologies were introduced that altered the form, volume, or speed of information. As a consequence, Western culture had more than two hundred years to accustom itself to the new information conditions created by the press. It developed new institutions, such as the school and representative government. It developed new conceptions of knowledge and intelligence, and a heightened respect for reason and privacy. It developed new forms of economic activity, such as mechanized production and corporate capitalism, and even gave articulate expression to the possibilities of a humane socialism. New forms of public discourse came into being through newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and books. It is no wonder that the eighteenth century gave us in the work of Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Vico, Edward Gibbon, and, of course, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Thomas Paine. I weight the list with America’s “Founding Fathers” because technocratic-typographic America was the first nation ever to be argued into existence in print.

Contrast the luxuriously slow social pace of the Gutenberg era with today’s information development timelines. Over the course of three decades, we’ve seen the rise and now-decline of the open web; the rise and now-decline of social media; the rise of short-form video and the rise of chatbots and synthetic information. All created enormous economic and philosophical disruptions whose fundamental impacts you can’t get a group of people in a room together to describe accurately. Among the disruptions: These increasingly efficient forms of sharing information keep encountering falling test scores; universities are trying to implement AI as their own students use it for cheating or boo the tech at their graduations; people are falling in love with their chatbots, which sometimes tell their users to kill themselves. A society that wants to understand itself probably wouldn’t act like this…

Read on for how we might — dare one suggest, should— act: “A society that wants to understand itself probably wouldn’t act like this,” from @mattdpearce.com.

Compare to/contrast with with Yuval Avnar‘s riff on Pascal’s musing on the implications of his invention, the “arithmetic machine” (an early, if not the first, modern mechanical calculator): “The Inventor of the Thinking Machine Didn’t Worry. Neither Should You.“

* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

###

As we introspect, we might send pointed birthday greetings to Ambrose Bierce; he was born on this date in 1842. His satirical lexicon The Devil’s Dictionary was named as one of “The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature” by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration.  His story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” has been described as “one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature”; and his book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (also published as In the Midst of Life) was named by the Grolier Club as one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900.

A prolific and versatile writer, Bierce was regarded as one of the most influential journalists in the United States, and as a pioneering writer of realist fiction.  For his horror writing, Michael Dirda ranked him alongside Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft.  S. T. Joshi argues that he may well be the greatest satirist America has ever produced, and can take his place with such figures as Juvenal, Swift, and Voltaire.  His war stories influenced Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and others; and he was an influential and feared literary critic.  In recent decades Bierce has gained even wider regard as a fabulist and for his poetry.

In 1913, Bierce told reporters that he was travelling to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. He disappeared over the border and was never seen again. 

Apropos the piece featured above:

TELEPHONE, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

– The Devil’s Dictionary

source

“The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation”*…

Matt Pearce revisits Neil Postman‘s 1992 Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology…

In the 1960s, a German-American computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum coded an early version of today’s AI chatbots. Weizenbaum called his program ELIZA, after the “My Fair Lady” character Eliza Doolittle who takes speech lessons (and gets better).

How people reacted to Weizenbaum’s crude creation tells us almost everything we need to know about AI hype more than half a century later.

ELIZA could hold basic “conversations,” including playing the role of a psychotherapist with real human users. [In the example above, ELIZA’s responses to one woman are shown in capital letters.]

Anybody with a cursory awareness of recent headlines about AI romances and AI psychosis already knows where this is going. ELIZA’s human interlocuters in the 1960s, despite talking to a clunky machine they knew had been programmed by Weizenbaum, refused to believe that they were talking to a mere machine. His secretary, having watched him build the contraption over several months, after just a few exchanges with ELIZA, asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so she could have some privacy.

Weizenbaum, exhibiting a bit of Freudian sangfroid about all this, was not surprised to see people form emotional attachments with inanimate objects. He’d already seen people get attached to their cars or guitars or computers. But “what I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people,” Weizenbaum wrote in his 1976 book “Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation.”…

… I learned about Weizenbaum’s ELIZA experiment from Neil Postman’s 1992 book “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology,” a work of technoconservatism that, like Weizenbaum’s writings, was imbued with foresight about our struggles with today’s vastly more powerful technologies.

Consider this passage from Postman’s “Technopoly”:

In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.

Technology, attacking and taking over the culture? Bending society to its own imperative for advancement? In my United States of America? Postman (most famous for writing “Amusing Ourselves to Death”) thought the U.S. was the world’s first “Technopoly,” a society marked by “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology,” where information itself has become a form of pollution.

To Postman, “the milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning or purpose.”

Neil Postman wrote “Technopoly” before the introduction of ChatGPT and Sora; TikTok and YouTube; Twitter and Facebook; Google Search and the Netscape browser. Postman wrote the book before Windows 95 existed. A philosophy of technology that mostly holds up through successive eras of technical revolution has already passed time’s first test, which is for the philosophy to outlive the philosopher. And Postman’s philosophy is ultimately conservative, motivated by the desire to preserve the traditions of humanism, social cohesion and a shareable sense of collective history.

Technoconservatism was old before it was new. Postman quotes Plato’s “Phaedrus,” where Thamus warns that whoever learns writing (one of our first dangerous technologies) “will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful” and “will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” And Postman, to his credit, is like — well, yeah! Writing really did that. A new technology is neither good nor bad, but ecological: it “does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe.”

In previous generations, societies dealt with information revolutions (which always produced information gluts) by creating institutions that prioritize “good” information and deprioritize the bad; think about schools with their organized curricula, courts with their standards of evidence, newspapers with their party lines or codes of journalistic ethics. But Postman notes that we got lucky after the Gutenberg revolution, when information technology’s development slowed down long enough for societies to catch up and be excellent:

From the early seventeenth century, when Western culture undertook to reorganize itself to accommodate the printing press, until the mid-nineteenth century [with the invention of the telegraph], no significant technologies were introduced that altered the form, volume, or speed of information. As a consequence, Western culture had more than two hundred years to accustom itself to the new information conditions created by the press. It developed new institutions, such as the school and representative government. It developed new conceptions of knowledge and intelligence, and a heightened respect for reason and privacy. It developed new forms of economic activity, such as mechanized production and corporate capitalism, and even gave articulate expression to the possibilities of a humane socialism. New forms of public discourse came into being through newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and books. It is no wonder that the eighteenth century gave us in the work of Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Vico, Edward Gibbon, and, of course, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Thomas Paine. I weight the list with America’s “Founding Fathers” because technocratic-typographic America was the first nation ever to be argued into existence in print.

Contrast the luxuriously slow social pace of the Gutenberg era with today’s information development timelines. Over the course of three decades, we’ve seen the rise and now-decline of the open web; the rise and now-decline of social media; the rise of short-form video and the rise of chatbots and synthetic information. All created enormous economic and philosophical disruptions whose fundamental impacts you can’t get a group of people in a room together to describe accurately. Among the disruptions: These increasingly efficient forms of sharing information keep encountering falling test scores; universities are trying to implement AI as their own students use it for cheating or boo the tech at their graduations; people are falling in love with their chatbots, which sometimes tell their users to kill themselves. A society that wants to understand itself probably wouldn’t act like this…

Read on for how we might — dare one suggest, should— act: “A society that wants to understand itself probably wouldn’t act like this,” from @mattdpearce.com.

Compare to/contrast with with Yuval Avnar‘s riff on Pascal’s musing on the implications of his invention, the “arithmetic machine” (an early, if not the first, modern mechanical calculator): “The Inventor of the Thinking Machine Didn’t Worry. Neither Should You.“

* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

###

As we introspect, we might send pointed birthday greetings to Ambrose Bierce; he was born on this date in 1842. His satirical lexicon The Devil’s Dictionary was named as one of “The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature” by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration.  His story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” has been described as “one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature”; and his book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (also published as In the Midst of Life) was named by the Grolier Club as one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900.

A prolific and versatile writer, Bierce was regarded as one of the most influential journalists in the United States, and as a pioneering writer of realist fiction.  For his horror writing, Michael Dirda ranked him alongside Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft.  S. T. Joshi argues that he may well be the greatest satirist America has ever produced, and can take his place with such figures as Juvenal, Swift, and Voltaire.  His war stories influenced Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and others; and he was an influential and feared literary critic.  In recent decades Bierce has gained even wider regard as a fabulist and for his poetry.

In 1913, Bierce told reporters that he was travelling to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. He disappeared over the border and was never seen again. 

Apropos the piece featured above:

TELEPHONE, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

– The Devil’s Dictionary

source

“The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation”*…

Matt Pearce revisits Neil Postman‘s 1992 Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology…

In the 1960s, a German-American computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum coded an early version of today’s AI chatbots. Weizenbaum called his program ELIZA, after the “My Fair Lady” character Eliza Doolittle who takes speech lessons (and gets better).

How people reacted to Weizenbaum’s crude creation tells us almost everything we need to know about AI hype more than half a century later.

ELIZA could hold basic “conversations,” including playing the role of a psychotherapist with real human users. [In the example above, ELIZA’s responses to one woman are shown in capital letters.]

Anybody with a cursory awareness of recent headlines about AI romances and AI psychosis already knows where this is going. ELIZA’s human interlocuters in the 1960s, despite talking to a clunky machine they knew had been programmed by Weizenbaum, refused to believe that they were talking to a mere machine. His secretary, having watched him build the contraption over several months, after just a few exchanges with ELIZA, asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so she could have some privacy.

Weizenbaum, exhibiting a bit of Freudian sangfroid about all this, was not surprised to see people form emotional attachments with inanimate objects. He’d already seen people get attached to their cars or guitars or computers. But “what I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people,” Weizenbaum wrote in his 1976 book “Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation.”…

… I learned about Weizenbaum’s ELIZA experiment from Neil Postman’s 1992 book “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology,” a work of technoconservatism that, like Weizenbaum’s writings, was imbued with foresight about our struggles with today’s vastly more powerful technologies.

Consider this passage from Postman’s “Technopoly”:

In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.

Technology, attacking and taking over the culture? Bending society to its own imperative for advancement? In my United States of America? Postman (most famous for writing “Amusing Ourselves to Death”) thought the U.S. was the world’s first “Technopoly,” a society marked by “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology,” where information itself has become a form of pollution.

To Postman, “the milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning or purpose.”

Neil Postman wrote “Technopoly” before the introduction of ChatGPT and Sora; TikTok and YouTube; Twitter and Facebook; Google Search and the Netscape browser. Postman wrote the book before Windows 95 existed. A philosophy of technology that mostly holds up through successive eras of technical revolution has already passed time’s first test, which is for the philosophy to outlive the philosopher. And Postman’s philosophy is ultimately conservative, motivated by the desire to preserve the traditions of humanism, social cohesion and a shareable sense of collective history.

Technoconservatism was old before it was new. Postman quotes Plato’s “Phaedrus,” where Thamus warns that whoever learns writing (one of our first dangerous technologies) “will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful” and “will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” And Postman, to his credit, is like — well, yeah! Writing really did that. A new technology is neither good nor bad, but ecological: it “does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe.”

In previous generations, societies dealt with information revolutions (which always produced information gluts) by creating institutions that prioritize “good” information and deprioritize the bad; think about schools with their organized curricula, courts with their standards of evidence, newspapers with their party lines or codes of journalistic ethics. But Postman notes that we got lucky after the Gutenberg revolution, when information technology’s development slowed down long enough for societies to catch up and be excellent:

From the early seventeenth century, when Western culture undertook to reorganize itself to accommodate the printing press, until the mid-nineteenth century [with the invention of the telegraph], no significant technologies were introduced that altered the form, volume, or speed of information. As a consequence, Western culture had more than two hundred years to accustom itself to the new information conditions created by the press. It developed new institutions, such as the school and representative government. It developed new conceptions of knowledge and intelligence, and a heightened respect for reason and privacy. It developed new forms of economic activity, such as mechanized production and corporate capitalism, and even gave articulate expression to the possibilities of a humane socialism. New forms of public discourse came into being through newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and books. It is no wonder that the eighteenth century gave us in the work of Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Vico, Edward Gibbon, and, of course, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Thomas Paine. I weight the list with America’s “Founding Fathers” because technocratic-typographic America was the first nation ever to be argued into existence in print.

Contrast the luxuriously slow social pace of the Gutenberg era with today’s information development timelines. Over the course of three decades, we’ve seen the rise and now-decline of the open web; the rise and now-decline of social media; the rise of short-form video and the rise of chatbots and synthetic information. All created enormous economic and philosophical disruptions whose fundamental impacts you can’t get a group of people in a room together to describe accurately. Among the disruptions: These increasingly efficient forms of sharing information keep encountering falling test scores; universities are trying to implement AI as their own students use it for cheating or boo the tech at their graduations; people are falling in love with their chatbots, which sometimes tell their users to kill themselves. A society that wants to understand itself probably wouldn’t act like this…

Read on for how we might — dare one suggest, should— act: “A society that wants to understand itself probably wouldn’t act like this,” from @mattdpearce.com.

Compare to/contrast with with Yuval Avnar‘s riff on Pascal’s musing on the implications of his invention, the “arithmetic machine” (an early, if not the first, modern mechanical calculator): “The Inventor of the Thinking Machine Didn’t Worry. Neither Should You.“

* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

###

As we introspect, we might send pointed birthday greetings to Ambrose Bierce; he was born on this date in 1842. His satirical lexicon The Devil’s Dictionary was named as one of “The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature” by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration.  His story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” has been described as “one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature”; and his book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (also published as In the Midst of Life) was named by the Grolier Club as one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900.

A prolific and versatile writer, Bierce was regarded as one of the most influential journalists in the United States, and as a pioneering writer of realist fiction.  For his horror writing, Michael Dirda ranked him alongside Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft.  S. T. Joshi argues that he may well be the greatest satirist America has ever produced, and can take his place with such figures as Juvenal, Swift, and Voltaire.  His war stories influenced Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and others; and he was an influential and feared literary critic.  In recent decades Bierce has gained even wider regard as a fabulist and for his poetry.

In 1913, Bierce told reporters that he was travelling to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. He disappeared over the border and was never seen again. 

Apropos the piece featured above:

TELEPHONE, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

– The Devil’s Dictionary

source

I friend sent me a clipping with this #quote...

"Ignorance now rules America. Not the simple, if somewhat innocent ignorance that comes from an absence of knowledge, but a malicious ignorance forged on the arrogance of refusing to think hard about an issue." -- Henry Giroux (The Terror of the Unforeseen)

I was unfamiliar with both the book and the author. His bibliography reminds me a bit of #NeilPostman.

#HenryGiroux #Book Willful #Ignorance of #America & #Americans

I friend sent me a clipping with this #quote...

"Ignorance now rules America. Not the simple, if somewhat innocent ignorance that comes from an absence of knowledge, but a malicious ignorance forged on the arrogance of refusing to think hard about an issue." -- Henry Giroux (The Terror of the Unforeseen)

I was unfamiliar with both the book and the author. His bibliography reminds me a bit of #NeilPostman.

#HenryGiroux #Book Willful #Ignorance of #America & #Americans

🎭 Oh, so you're not just tired, you're in an existential crisis! 🤔 Thanks, Neil, for reminding us that our mundane struggles are actually just a lack of cosmic purpose. 🌌 Because clearly, it's not the endless Zoom calls or late-night emails, but a Nietzschean void that's leaving us unfulfilled. 🌀
https://neilthanedar.com/youre-not-burnt-out-youre-existentially-starving/ #existentialcrisis #cosmicpurpose #nihilism #modernstruggles #NeilPostman #Zoomfatigue #HackerNews #ngated

🎭 Oh, so you're not just tired, you're in an existential crisis! 🤔 Thanks, Neil, for reminding us that our mundane struggles are actually just a lack of cosmic purpose. 🌌 Because clearly, it's not the endless Zoom calls or late-night emails, but a Nietzschean void that's leaving us unfulfilled. 🌀
https://neilthanedar.com/youre-not-burnt-out-youre-existentially-starving/ #existentialcrisis #cosmicpurpose #nihilism #modernstruggles #NeilPostman #Zoomfatigue #HackerNews #ngated

#AldousHuxley:
- #LeMeilleurDesMondes (1931)
- Retour au meilleur des mondes

"la #dictature parfaite [...]. Une #prison sans murs dont les prisonniers ne songeraient pas à s'évader. Un système d' #esclavage où, grace à la #consommation et au divertissement, les esclaves auraient l' #amour de leur #servitude."

#GeorgeOrwell : 1984 (1949)

-> #NeilPostman : https://mastodon.social/@cobrate/115005629623826499

#Livre #psy #manipulation #obscurantisme #mastolivre #AldousHuxley #GeorgeOrwell

Visions of the Future: How to Be a Realist in a Techno-Optimist World

https://therealists.org/?p=8080

We are on the cusp of a new era.

Apple – the world’s second largest company by market cap ($2.85 trillion as of Feb. 1, 2024) – is putting significant R&D and marketing efforts in the promotion of a new product (Vision Pro) and a new tech category: spatial computing – as in, a computer you wear on your face that blends the physical and digital worlds.

a still image from Apple’s video introducing Vision Pro

Tremendous cultural and societal changes are potentially on the horizon. The risk? The real world seeming too boring to experience without tech overlayed on top of it.

An even bigger risk: the invasion of our private moments for advertising purposes – where every second of our lives become an opportunity by Big Tech to sell us something. Ubiquitous, micro-targeted, constant advertising.

I think we don’t realize how lucky we are this very moment, when opportunities to be exposed to microtargeted ads are limited to the time we spend on our computers and smartphones (if we don’t have adblock or a pi-hole turned on).

“A tech fentanyl dealer posing as a rehab provider”

The digital cover of the Vanity Fair issue with a profile of Tim Cook and Apple’s Vision Pro

Journalist Nick Bilton recently wrote a feature for Vanity Fair about Apple’s Vision Pro and the Cupertino-based company’s big bet on spatial computing: “Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision Pro.“

This is how Bilton felt after taking off Vision Pro and experiencing the world as it is:

When I take it off, every other device feels flat and boring: My 75-inch OLED TV feels like a CRT from the ’90s; my iPhone feels like a flip phone from yesteryear, and even the real world around me feels surprisingly flat. And this is the problem. In the same way that I can’t imagine driving a car without a stereo, in the same way I can’t imagine not having a phone to communicate with people or take pictures of my children, in the same way I can’t imagine trying to work without a computer, I can see a day when we all can’t imagine living without an augmented reality. When we’re enveloped more and more by technology, to the point that we crave these glasses like a drug, like we crave our iPhones today but with more desire for the dopamine hit this resolution of AR can deliver. I know deep down that the Apple Vision Pro is too immersive, and yet all I want to do is see the world through it.

I’ve been haunted by Bilton’s testimony ever since I’ve read this article. Even more chilling is what followed:

“I’m sure the technology is terrific. I still think and hope it fails,” one Silicon Valley investor said to me. “Apple feels more and more like a tech fentanyl dealer that poses as a rehab provider.” Harsh words, but he feels what we all feel, a slave to our smartphone, and he’s seen this play before and he knows what the first act is like, and the second act, and he knows how it ends.

I read Bilton’s article as I was in public transportation last weekend while I was out running errands. As I stepped on a crowded subway platform, waiting for a train that would take me to a restaurant, where my husband and my daughter were waiting for me, I could not stop thinking about Bilton’s words. My first thought was: it’s really nice to see other people’s faces. Am I witnessing the last days and months of an old world, before Vision Pro and copycat spatial computing goggles go mainstream? What will the world look like for my daughter 10 years from now? Will most people be moving around with a VR headset strapped on their faces? Or will these remain a niche product like Google Glass and Snap Spectacles and Oculus headsets?

This technology will surely evolve over the years, making spatial computing devices lighter and less obtrusive. I wouldn’t be surprised if a decade from now this technology will be incorporated in contact lenses or elegant glasses – impossible to notice by a casual observer.

Why is this a problem? Through spatial computing, Big Tech will surely be able to mine even more personal data and exploit uncharted parts of our lives for commercial purposes. 24/7 surveillance and data mining that will potentially rob us of our privacy and lead to behavioral changes in service of commerce and consumerism. Advertising may become even more embedded in our everyday lives, with exposure to ads a constant in augmented reality spaces. Just think about the film Minority Report and the future it envisioned (watch a short excerpt on YouTube).

The Future is Unwritten: Knowledge + Action = Power

Earlier this week, as I was walking through central Paris after a meeting, I spotted a giant mural that left me speechless for its powerful message and its timeliness. I immediately recognized the style of Shepard Fairey, who has created other iconic murals in Paris (in addition to Obama’s famous campaign poster). This work – on a wall near the Stravinsky Fountain, next to a Jef Aerosol giant pochoir – shows two women, depicted in Art Nouveau style, each standing on a pile of books and stretching their arms, as if they’re holding a lotus flower. An open book at their feet says “The Future is Unwritten” and below there’s the sentence “Knowledge + Action = Power.”

Murals in Paris: right, Shepard Farey’s “The Future is Unwritten”

We live in a techno-optimist world, where technological change is heavily promoted by companies who reap large profits from it, without much thought about societal consequences.

Remember the quasi-religious fervor the world witnessed after Steve Jobs introduced the first ever iPhone in 2007? The device was quickly nicknamed the “Jesus phone” and even Apple’s own advertising played on this. My pet peeve during the 2000s-2010s? Introductions of new platforms and devices by Big Tech, followed by fawning articles by tech reporters. Articles that read like glorified press releases, without much critical thought put into them.

The first ever ad for Apple’s iPhone with the slogan “Touching is believing”

Well, the tides have turned. I am feeling a glimmer of hope following the introduction of Apple’s Vision Pro: from The Verge to Wired to the New York Times, the most shared sentiment in reaction to the release of this device was skepticism and head-scratching regarding its usefulness.

• The Verge: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not
• Wired: Apple’s Vision Pro Isn’t the Future
• The New York Times: Vision Pro Review: Apple’s First Headset Lacks Polish and Purpose

A future where we walk around with a device our face that blends the real world with the digital world is not inevitable.

The future is still unwritten.

We can object to such a future – like people did 10 years ago with the introduction of Google Glass. Remember that people who wore Google Glasses out in public where called “Glassholes”?

According to Wikipedia:

Google started selling a prototype of Google Glass to qualified “Glass Explorers” in the US on April 15, 2013, for a limited period for $1,500, before it became available to the public on May 15, 2014. It had an integral 5 megapixel still/720p video camera. The headset received a great deal of criticism amid concerns that its use could violate existing privacy laws. On January 15, 2015, Google announced that it would stop producing the Google Glass prototype. The prototype was succeeded by two Enterprise Editions, whose sales were suspended on March 15, 2023.

Winners and Losers

The introduction of this new product category inspired me to rewatch an iconic lecture by the late Neil Postman: “Six Questions about Technology” (held at Calvin College in 1998).

Postman said:

[Only] a fool doesn’t know that new technology always produce winners and losers and there is nothing irrational about loser resistance. Bill Gates who is of course a winner knows this and because he is no fool, his propaganda continuously implies that computer technology can bring harm to no one. Well that’s the way of winners – they want losers to be grateful… and enthusiastic… and especially – best of all – to be unaware that they are losers.

This is such a powerful concept worth repeating: “they want losers to be grateful… and enthusiastic… and especially – best of all – to be unaware that they are losers.”

Later he continued:

Television gives power to some, while it deprives others and that is true of every important medium and this fact has always been understood by intelligent entrepreneurs who see opportunities emerging from the creation of new media. And that that’s why media entrepreneurs are the most radical force in culture. They are interested in maximizing profits of new media and do not usually give much thought to large scale cultural effects. America’s greatest radicals have always been our entrepreneurs: (Samuel) Morse, (Alexander Graham) Bell, (Thomas) Edison, (David) Sarnoff, (Walt) Disney. These men created the 20th century as Bill Gates and others are creating the 21st. I don’t know if much can be done to moderate the cultural changes that media entrepreneurs will enforce. But citizens ought to know about what is happening and keep an attentive eye on such people.

Knowledge: Postman’s Six Questions

Here are the six questions cultural critic Neil Postman said we should always ask ourselves when a new technology is introduced.

Keep in mind Apple’s Vision Pro and the new field of spatial computing when reading them:

1. What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?
2. Whose problem is it?
3. Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution?
4. What new problems might be created because we have solved this problem?
5. What sort of people and institutions might acquire special economic and political power because of technological change?
6. What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies, and what is being gained and lost by such changes?

Action: Resist

Similarly with what happened with Google Glass 10 years ago, we can reject and label as creepy recording devices that sits on one’s face – when one is out in public. I’m sure there can be interesting use cases at home, while watching movies for example. But we don’t need to see people in these recording headsets out in the street.

We collectively rejected Google Glass 10 years ago – and the product went bust.

In this case outright rejecting Apple’s Vision Pro will prove to be a challenge because of Apple’s cool factor and the fact Vision Pro is mostly touted to be used in the privacy of our homes or offices. But remember: the ultimate goal of Apple is to normalize and make spatial computing go mainstream – making us embrace this technology so that 5 or 10 years from now, we won’t be able to live without it.

The future envisioned by Minority Report is incredibly attractive to Big Tech for the opportunity to mine our personal lives and data for their profit.

It’s up to us to resist to this future – now. Before the technology becomes too embedded in our daily lives.

Power

Ultimately, the power rests within us.

We don’t have to accept VR headsets or spatial computing as the new normal. Resistance – especially outspoken resistance – is an empowering option available now. Before it’s too late.

#Apple #attentionEconomy #digitalLiteracy #dystopia #films #future #MinorityReport #NeilPostman #resistance #ShepardFarey #spatialComputing #technoOptimism #technoOptimist #VisionPro

The In-Betweeners

https://therealists.org/?p=8116

Capturing Gen Z’s attention

In early December I was invited to give a 30 minute presentation about The Realists for recent graduates of a prestigious business school in Paris. Their teacher told me that the students were already aware of many of the topics I typically write about – Big Tech, surveillance capitalism, behavioral manipulation – especially after watching the documentary The Social Dilemma. My task: to keep my presentation fresh and original to impress an audience that grew up online.

In the days leading up to the lecture, I was really intimidated. I had shown my documentary The Illusionists to auditoriums with over 300 spectators – but presenting to a class of 30 or so Gen Z students felt far more daunting. What could I possibly tell them that would grab and hold their attention?

Until I found an angle – that the audience eventually appreciated.

Meet a Geriatric Millennial

I am a geriatric millennial: I had an analog childhood in the 1980s; discovered the Web 1.0 in my teens, and the birth of social media once I was a university student.

I have this unique perspective of being in between worlds: I experienced socialization away from screens for most of my childhood and early adolescence; and the tidal wave of the internet and the monumental changes it brought to us as humans once I was already a young adult.

My dad worked in technology and would bring home early computer prototypes. Our first laptop, in the late 1980s, came in a heavy grey plastic suitcase that opened to reveal a keyboard on one side and a small orange, low resolution screen on the other. The availability of the internet would be a few years away… all I could do was play around with DOS commands and Paintbrush.

An IBM computer from the 1980s. Source: Wikimedia

At home, I would be engrossed in these new technological tools. At school, none of my classmates could relate to these experiences, as personal computers were still rare and prohibitively expensive in Italy at the time.

While preparing the presentation for the class of business graduates in December, I realized that I have always felt in between worlds. One foot in the digital world; one foot out in the real world. It’s been my normal my entire life. And being an in-betweener can offer a powerful perspective to what is happening to our world today.

An in-betweener doesn’t accept new things as normal; an in-betweener is reminded of what “normal” used to be like and questions every innovation. Maybe this is why I am so drawn to the writings of the late Neil Postman – especially his superb book Technopoly – as he held the same critical attitude towards technology.

The Last Generation

I belong to the last generation that grew up offline. The LAST one. Generations that came after me experienced the internet and social media from middle school… or even earlier. The only people who could relate to this are my late grandparents. They were born in a world without television… and then, in their adult years, they discovered this “magical” box that would bring the outside world in their living room.

As a geriatric millennial I distinctly remember what friendships used to be like – nurtured in the real world, away from screens. Sure, I would spend hours on the phone talking to friends in high school, once I got home from school. But there weren’t technological companies involved in mediating our communications, gamifying our interactions with hearts and likes and visible metrics. I am not saying one way is better than the other. Do not mistake this as nostalgia for a time now gone. Mine is just the testimony of someone who remembers what it was like to hang out for hours with friends in the afternoon, after school, in the absence of the internet, social media and the walled gardens of Big Tech.

I was an in-betweener as a child and adolescent, dipping in and out of two worlds. And I am still an in-betweener today, in 2024. How? You may wonder.

Half the day online; half the day offline

I wake up at around 6am every day. I immediately go online to read the news (bad habit, I know) or resume reading a book on my Kindle. Then I have coffee, get ready, and wake up my little one at around 8am. As soon as my child is with me, the phone goes in my back pocket… and stays there until I drop her off at daycare. I go home to work, power up my computer and tablet and dip back in the digital world for about 6 hours. When, at 3:30pm, it’s time to go pick her up from daycare, the computer and tablet shut off for the rest of the day and the phone returns in my back pocket… where it will stay for the next 5 hours, until my child is asleep.

I’ve been putting away my smartphone when I’m with my child ever since she was born: I never wanted to give her the impression that whatever appeared on this small black rectangle was more important than her. My number one priority has been – for 3 years now – to give her my undivided attention.

It’s fascinating to see how we model behaviors to our little ones and how much they learn by observing us.

Ever since my child’s toddlerhood, she has often yearned to imitate what mommy does. At home, we have had an unplugged, inactive cordless phone lying around in the living room. I explained to my child that that black object is a phone. Next time I caught her playing with it, she was trying to shove it in her back pocket – even if her pants that day didn’t have one. So she simply took the phone and sat on it. And then looked up at me and said “phone pocket.” It was hilarious. And incredibly endearing and powerful. When it happened my girl wasn’t even 2 yet… maybe she was 18 months old. And yet, she knew what I kept in my back pocket was a phone. And that it belonged there when we were together.

Takeaways from a tech-free, TV-free life

What happens when a 3 year old doesn’t have access to television, smartphones or tablets for “entertainment”? The entire world around them is an object of wonder, to be observed with the utmost curiosity and vigilance. A 360° interactive playground.

For example, on the way to daycare in the morning, she often screams “Mom! The moon!” The first time it happened I thought to myself: “what is she talking about it’s daytime” But then I looked up to the sky and saw a banana-shaped tiny sliver of light. Sure enough, there was a crescent moon barely visible behind some fluffy clouds.

It takes my girl less than 5 seconds to spot the moon on a clear morning, whenever we leave our apartment building. The moon… planes… cats perched on a windowsill… my offline, screen-free toddler spots interesting things all the time – an inspires me to be present, in the real world, and to notice interesting things too, so I can point them out to her.

Conversely, on the way to daycare, we often come across people walking while staring down at their phones, completely oblivious to the world around them. How many crashes have I averted! When I’m in a rush, pushing her stroller, I often feel like I’m playing a real life video game. Think: Frogger, but the obstacles and dangers are not cars and trucks… they are fast-walking humans whose eyes are hypnotized by cell phones and who do not notice incoming pedestrians.

It’s a bit awkward to be with my toddler and observe her observe these people who are completely engrossed in their screens. Whenever I get on public transportation with her, we are often the only people not staring down at a screen during the journey. She often tries to smile and establish eye contact with people – especially if someone is dressed in her favorite color – but it’s rare to have people look up and smile back. Fellow moms and dads, or people over the age of 70… but that’s about it. Luckily I always pack books, so we can read stories… and I can pull her attention away from this new normal of disconnection. My explanation to her “they’re probably writing to or reading a message from their mom.” Ha!

The Pursuit of Human Happiness

Seeing what makes my child tick, what she needs to be happy (attention! love! safety! her favorite stories!) is the biggest drive for me to make a documentary on technology and how it is changing us as humans.

Kids a decade older than my child are witnessing an epidemic of depression and anxiety – that has coincided with the introduction of smartphones and gamified social media platforms.

The idea that my child’s happiness will one day depend on social media metrics and online popularity – subject to an opaque algorithm – just about breaks my heart and infuriates me at the same time. I intend to fiercely protect her from this ugly digital world for as long as I can… and when she’s old enough, educate her about the mechanisms driving it and teach her to question everything and to follow the money.

My child may one day see me as an out of touch dinosaur, but I will be in the position to remind her that there used to be another way. And that there still is another way – if she chooses it. The Realists’ way. Informed, aware, and keen on using tech in a mindful way, instead of being used by it.

Thanks for being here.

Elena

#digitalLiteracy #GenX #GenZ #geriatricMillennial #millennials #NeilPostman #parenting #personalHistory #screenFree #socialMedia

I recently had a powerful epiphany: all the research and the work I had been doing for The Realists had the framing all wrong.

For years, I had been thinking that my “enemy”, my nemesis, adversary – however you want to call it – was Big Tech… the companies that have built systems of surveillance capitalism and are profiting from it. The platforms promoting unattainable beauty and life ideals. The popular apps that are addictive by design.

But no, I now realize I had it all wrong.

The real “enemy” is indifference – people’s indifference to the monumental changes brought on by Big Tech. What they are doing to our humanity. How they are changing what we value. How we see ourselves. Our dreams and aspirations. How we socialize. How we raise our kids.

Big Tech will continue to keep a powerful hold on our lives if we think that “the toothpaste is already out of the tube”, that the changes are inevitable, and that it’s a good thing to jump on all the latest trends, use the most popular apps, under the belief that they will make our lives better.

Media Consumption

I find it astonishing that nowadays people worldwide spend an average of 455 minutes per day consuming media – that’s 7.58 hours a day. And yet, most people have a vague understanding of the effects of media on their lives, self-esteem and worldview.

My interest in the subject? I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Mass Communication and I still vividly remember concepts from my college classes about “Persuasion and Public Opinion” and “Media Effects.”

For example, are you familiar with any of these media theories? “Agenda setting” and “Gatekeeping”? “Cultivation Theory”? The “Magic Bullet Theory”?

I learned about these theories many years ago and today the media landscape is completely different. There are now powerful communication devices in everyone’s pocket… and they are being used extensively, for most of people’s waking lives, without much thought about it.

I notice indifference… and I also notice – and experience – resistance to tech resistance. What do I mean by that? I have the perfect example from my personal life.

Resistance to (Tech) Resistance

I’m the mom of a two-year-old daughter.

I have been called a “Taliban” “Putin” and an “extremist” for wanting to raise her screen-free, without any visual media except for interactive FaceTime videos with her grandparents who live far away. (Incidentally, that’s what the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends, but to some people, it appears to be extreme).

It’s ironic that I’m a filmmaker – but my child has never watched a video in her life. To her, a phone is something that stays in the back pocket; an iPad is a magical portal for video calls with her grandparents. I don’t own a TV and aside from iPad video calls her screen time is exactly 0 minutes a day. She’s 26 months old. And I wouldn’t do things any other way.

Thankfully the colorful nicknames/insults came from one person and they have been toned down since that person watched a documentary on the effects of screen time on young children’s brain development.

These nicknames may sound a bit harsh, but in several situations, with other adults around me and my child, I have noticed similar attitudes. Resistance to my resistance.

I’ve been told that it would be impossible to handle my child on the plane without a tablet or smartphone… and yet she aced her first flights, entertained by her parents, her favorite books and a teddy bear.

I’ve been called “excessive” for voicing my concerns about screen time and reading “too many books” to my child. I was warned I would ruin her eyes with books.

I’ve been advised not to talk about how I raise my child screen-free lest I offend other parents and grandparents who do things differently.

But I think it’s important to share my experiences, to show that there is another way.

Thankfully my husband is on the same page as me, wanting to raise her like we were raised. Think: a childhood like we had in the 1980s – minus television, plus an iPad only for FaceTime calls.

Who’s Raising the Kids?

I have been closely following the work of Dr. Susan Linn for years – a psychologist who founded the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. I have interviewed her for my documentary The Illusionists and I recently read her powerful new book Who’s Raising the Kids? Big Tech, Big Media, and the Lives of Children.

Dr. Linn writes:

You’re dealing with a culture dominated by multinational corporations spending billions of dollars and using seductive technologies to bypass parents and target children directly with messages designed — sometimes ingeniously — to capture their hearts and minds. And their primary purpose is not to help kids lead healthy lives or to promote positive values or even to make their lives better. It’s to generate profit.

Later in the book, she adds:

Traditionally, for kids having what Winnicott might call “good enough” childhoods, the adults with whom they mostly interacted, and who had the most influence over them, were parents, other caregivers, and teachers. They were all familiar family or community members who were at least supposed to have children’s interests at heart. For better or worse, it’s common to raise children to be wary of strangers. Yet in a digitized, commercialized culture, we blithely turn vast portions of a child’s day over to strangers. We don’t see these people. Our kids never meet them. But these strangers know an enormous amount about our children. They know how to capture their attention, to exploit their vulnerabilities, and to trigger their longings. These are the strangers who own, manufacture, and advertise the apps, toys, and games that occupy children’s time and whose jobs demand that they develop and market products that generate big bucks regardless of their impact on the kids who use them.

Instant Gratification and Continuous Distraction

What worries me the most about the shifts brought on by this brave new technological world is this: the internet, smartphones and apps have created a frictionless world of instant gratification and constant distraction.

Are you bored? Fish your phone out of your pocket and you can scroll social media, listen to any song you may think of courtesy of Spotify or watch a video on YouTube.

Do you feel lonely? A couple of taps on the phone and you could communicate with a friend or see what they have posted on social media. Turn on the TV, keep it on in the background, and feel like you are not home alone.

Hungry? A meal can be delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less, courtesy of an app.

Everyday activities that take actual effort are starting to be frowned upon.

Silence and time away from a screen may make certain people uncomfortable.

Technology sweeps in, allowing people to never feel bored and giving them the illusion of connection… and handing them any object they may desire, delivered straight to their doors.

When it comes to spending time with a small child, many adults default to entertaining children with screens… not really thinking about the consequences of screen time and the content they will consume. These devices take away all the effort – but they also take away human connection and the opportunity for a child to develop their curiosity.

I can understand why people do this. Smartphones and tablets have been around for less than 20 years and to hundreds of millions of people they still have a magical aura around them. That’s why it’s so hard for adults to see them in a critical light. Dissenting voices are a minority. Tech giants spend a fortune in marketing their shiny devices and platforms. And – this is key – most people equate technology with progress and modernity – positive things. But media consumption and screen time carry consequences.

Dr. Linn writes in her book:

Today, children’s opportunities for silence — to experience wonder but also to play, dream, and explore — are rare. […] It was a long – ago conversation with Fred Rogers that first got me thinking about the importance of silence in children’s lives. Silence was so important to him that he once used an egg timer to tick off a whole minute of it on his television show. And after listening to cellist Yo-Yo Ma play his cello, Fred commented, “After you’ve heard someone play beautiful music, sometimes you just like to have a quiet time to remember it. Let’s just sit and think about what we’ve heard.”

The Universal Need for Media and Digital Literacy

I think media literacy AND digital literacy classes should be mandatory… not just for young people but also for all educators, parents, grandparents and caretakers. For all humans, really.

Because if you are a parent or grandparent and you read this sentence by Dr. Linn, wouldn’t you start to care?

It became clear to me that the problem with the tech-driven, omnipresent marketing that kids experience today isn’t just that they’re being sold stuff. It’s that the values, conventions, and behaviors embraced and engendered by gargantuan, minimally regulated, for-profit conglomerates permeate all aspects of society, including the lives of children.

I think they would. And they may think twice before handing their toddler a tablet or putting them in front of a TV.

The Lumineers’ song “Stubborn Love” goes: “The opposite of love’s indifference. So pay attention now…”

The ways in which technology has invaded the lives of small children – with most people accepting this uncritically – is just an example of indifference to Big Tech. I think it’s a particularly salient example because it powerfully affects a new generation.

How do we counteract indifference to Big Tech?

Through education. Media literacy AND digital literacy.

If you haven’t already, I would highly encourage you to read the late Neil Postman’s book Technopoly and Dr. Linn’s Who’s Raising the Kids? Listen to podcasts such as The Ezra Klein Show or Offline with Jon Favreau. And don’t be afraid to be different. To resist.

At the end of Technopoly Neil Postman writes:

A resistance fighter understands that technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things, that every technology—from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer—is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore require scrutiny, criticism, and control. In short, a technological resistance fighter maintains an epistemological and psychic distance from any technology, so that it always appears somewhat strange, never inevitable, never natural.

I encourage you to re-read Postman’s powerful words slowly, carefully.

And then spend a minute thinking about them – à la Fred Rogers.

“Let’s just sit and think about what we’ve heard.”

– Elena Rossini

The Clock!! as shown by Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization (1934) via Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1984)

... with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God’s supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment; that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser. Perhaps Moses should have included another Commandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical representations of time.
In Mumford’s great book Technics and Civilization, he shows how, beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded.
“The clock,” Mumford has concluded, “is a piece of power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes.” In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception, or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.